In Denmark last week, Muslim fanatics were caught conspiring to assassinate a cartoonist. In protest of the conspirators' arrest, and in protest of freedom of expression in general, other Muslim fanatics are committing arson and inciting riots. That can only mean one thing: it's February again.

February 2006, as some readers may recall, marked the launch of the First Cartoon Intifada. The previous fall, the Danish newspaper Politiken ran a brief story about Kare Bluitgen, a children's book author who was trying to write a book about Islam, and found that no illustrator was willing to take on the project, for fear of being slaughtered like Theo van Gogh.

Picking up on the story, Jyllands Posten, another Danish newspaper, printed a series of 12 cartoons, some (but not all!) of which depicted the prophet Muhammad, as a way of satirizing the circumstances under which Danish artists were too fearful forMuhammad cartoons: definitely justify murder their lives to accept payment for kiddie book drawings.

In the following months, Muslim states began pressuring the Danish government to punish the newspaper. To his lasting credit, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refused to submit to blackmail or compromise his country's fundamental freedoms. At that point, there was no way for humble sheep in the flock of God to let the world know just how much their righteous feelings had been hurt, except by torching the embassies of sovereign states, trampling bystanders to death and forcing artists into hiding.

The open rioting may have died down since then, but God's commandment to murder artists remains quite active, hence the recently uncovered plot to kill septuagenarian cartoonist Kurt Westergaard should hardly come as a surprise. What is surprising, and pleasantly so, is that Western media have not adopted a cowardly defensive crouch. Instead, newspapers across Denmark reprinted the Muhammad cartoons in solidarity with Westergaard.

Last time around, both media and political leaders pre-emptively covered themselves in disgrace. Newspapers all over the world refused to run the cartoons even though they were the focal point of the biggest news story in the world. Bill Clinton saw the occasion as an opportunity to denounce the cartoonists rather than their would-be butchers, decrying "this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark…these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam." Franco Fattini, then the E.U. Justice and Security Commissioner, made sure to "give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of free expression." Cardinal Ratzinger's church declared that "the right to freedom of expression does not imply the right to offend religious beliefs."

Just in case there ever is a genuine uprising in the Muslim world against proscribed art, as opposed to a premeditated incitement to violence on the part of theocratic bullies, Ratzinger and his confessional brethren might want to rethink their illiberalism on purely pragmatic grounds. Under the same interpretation of Islamic law that prohibits depictions of Muhammad, graphic representations of Jesus and all other Jewish and Christian prophets who are accepted into the Islamic tradition are utterly forbidden as well. The upshot is that all Catholic churches in the world --- with their stained glass portrayals of the Holy Family, the saints, and scenes from the Bible --- are just as much an offense to Islam as the Danish cartoons. In other words, burning down Danish consular buildings is no more or less justified than burning down the Vatican.

Mutatis mutandis, anyone who does not live under the strictures of Sharia law undoubtedly transgresses it, daily, in countlessly many ways. The question of whether to subject oneself to an ancient inflexible religious code is not a question of showing appropriate respect for the beliefs of others. It's a question of maintaining respect for oneself.

Related: More Jewcy coverage of free speech, censorship, and the Intoonfada from Michael Weiss, Ali Eteraz, and Mr Eugenides.

As I write, Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, and David Irving, Holocaust denier-in-chief, are preparing to speak to 500-odd smartly-dressed students and a pack of hacks at the Oxford Union Debating Society.

The OU's decision to invite a racist politician and an anti-Semitic historian to its hallowed halls has caused an almighty stink. A Conservative Member of Parliament resigned his life membership of the Union, and various other British bigwigs— including Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, and a black TV presenter called June Sarpong—have cancelled planned appearances at the OU.

The cry goes up around Britain: "How can supposedly brainy students provide aLeave the Gag Off So He Can Make an Ass of Himself: The British National Party's Nick Griffin platform for these charlatans?" For me, the most shocking thing is not that Griffin and Irving have been provided with a platform—after all, their weasel ideas are better out in the open where we can at least take potshots at them—but the issue they have been asked to pontificate about: the right to free speech!

The OU debate is titled "This house believes that even extremists have a right to freedom of expression," and Griffin and Irving are on the side of defending freedom of expression. Neither of them has a libertarian bone in his body. They wouldn't recognise free speech if it jumped them in an alley.

Irving's response to Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust, in which she exposed him as a fact-fiddling denier of the Nazis' extermination of half of Europe's Jews, was to demand that she pulp every copy. He then sued her for libel (and thankfully lost). So Irving supports freedom of expression for extremists, but not for American professors. Especially Jewish ones.

Griffin's British National Party (BNP) is founded on a profoundly authoritarian programme of restricting immigration into Britain. Asking these two characters to defend freedom of expression, or freedom of any kind, is a bit like asking Mark Chapman to speak on healthy hero worship.

That two fascists/fascist sympathisers can hold forth in Oxford about free speech is actually an indictment of the British left and British liberals. So-called progressives have abandoned the cause of free speech in recent years, which has allowed cranky elements on the right to pose as the true upholders of open debate.

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Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, January 14^th, 2005:

"There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call… the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, October 27^th, 2005:

“Israel must be wiped out from the map of the world. And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

Guess which one gets invited to speak at a college campus, and which one is just beyond the pale.

As if the U.N. weren't ineffectual enough, Doudou Diene, U.N. expert on racism has recently blown minds the world 'round by noting that defaming religion can stir people up. Especially Islam. Leaving aside the question of why supposed progressives conflate race with religion time and again, who gave this guy a job? Most likely somebody who also isn't savvy enough to notice the difference between a race and a belief system. Guess we can't leave that aside. It turns out the problem with this "debate" is a lack of discrimination--not discrimination against people or beliefs, but good old fashioned discrimination, the kind whose antonym is 'indiscriminant.'

Since when has challenging deeply held notions about the nature of reality and morality not been a threat to peace? Given that said notions can be both erroneous and destructive, who thinks that we should refrain? Plenty of people it seems:

African and Islamic countries welcomed the assessment and called for moves to draft an international treaty that would compel states to act against any form of defamation of religion.

If the claims of religion hadn't ever been challenged, or at least put in a box, dulled-down, re-worked, or at times completely eschewed, the human race would likely be extinct. Germs instead of demons. Medicine and moxie instead of prayer. It's been working out splendidly for the materialists of the world who have been saving humanity ten times a year for the last century or so. After all that, you'd expect a little respect, but the faithful have been ungrateful; delighting in the advances of science, popping Penicillin, while simultaneously espousing some of our era's most destructive ideas (the afterlife still being near the top of that list). Do they deserve an audience, much less a law protecting them should they choose to behave badly?

Now would come the customary attack, industrialization having made killing en masse easier, the "secular" ideologies of Nazism and communism (which looked and behaved like ultimate psycho cult religions), chemical warfare, the atomic bomb, and global warming. But no matter how impressively horrendous sounding it all is, this laundry list never manages to make the point intended. It does not follow that faith is therefore good and the doctrines of the faithful deserve to be shielded from critique or the normal parameters of free speech. Does anybody find it odd that those devoted to Britney Spears aren't expected to respond to her public ridicule with pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, while those devoted to Muhammad are? That expectation in itself--the expectation that undergirds this entire discussion--is profoundly disrespectful to Muslims.

Another bit of savvy could benefit this argument as well--distinguishing the faithful from a faith. It is for the law to protect people, not the worldview to which they subscribe. I might well get a royal head bashing if I were to walk into the wrong room full of football fans telling them that the MVP they all adore can't play ball. We negotiate these sorts of situations daily, but never do we decide that any one group or idea gets privilege under the law.

Continuing to bring this proposition up in the public sphere is only functioning as a daily reinforcement of an impoverished notion of responsibility. It is for critics to critique with respect for the person, even if not for the religion. It is for the criticized to respond in a civil manner. Neither is entitled, no matter what has been said or done, to threaten or inflict harm on the other. Last I checked, the saying doesn't go Sticks And Stones Will Break Your Bones If Your Words Happen to Hurt Me. Rather than just accepting that this is how certain offended religious people will act, has it occurred to anyone at the U.N. that perhaps a greater service to humanity might be a rejection of this sort of behavior in favor of re-asserting basic principles of civility and public discourse, regardless of which books inform your version of truth?

 

Orhan PamukTurkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk doesn’t mince his words. In a 2005 interview with the Swiss magazine Das Magazin, the novelist smashed two major taboos when he said, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” In Turkey, a veil of silence surrounds the military’s violent suppression of the Kurdish independence movement, and the government still denies the existence of the Armenian genocide during WWI. By alluding to both of these ...

You’ve all heard of the greater internet fuckwad theory, right? It’s an elegant equation that explains the jaw-dropping quantity of vulgar, libelous nonsense floating about on the internet. It goes like this:

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: the world wide web explained

Today, internet fuckwads everywhere are rejoicing, as the California Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 extends broad protection to sites like Jewcy when we publish (say, in our comment sections) all the scurrilous, slanderous drivel that oozes from your head. The protection is so broad that it’s being described as “blanket immunity.”

"The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications," Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion. "Nevertheless ... statutory immunity serves to protect online freedom of expression and to encourage self-regulation, as Congress intended."

Ms. Corrigan later explained that "The volume and range of Internet communications make the 'heckler's veto' a real threat," and that this threat must be preserved. “Heckler’s veto,” of course, is just legal fancytalk for “rantings of an internet fuckwad.”

Groups like American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are over the moon, but not everyone's happy. Whined losing attorney Christopher E. Grell,

“What you couldn't put in your print newspaper, you can put in your Internet newspaper. The notion of fact checking and verifying things doesn't apply to the Internet."

Is this guy for real? “Fact checking”? “Verifying things”? Anachronistic gobbledygook like that just makes my eyes glaze over. Barukh Hashem for the 21st century, online media, and the California Supreme Court.